Romania nearly had its first Abel laureate in 2025 – mathematician George Lusztig came close to winner Masaki Kashiwara / ”The difference between them was a small one” Professor explains

When the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced Masaki Kashiwara as the 2025 recipient of the Abel Prize – often referred to as the “Nobel of Mathematics” – the spotlight naturally turned to his groundbreaking work in algebraic analysis and representation theory. But what the public may not have seen was how close the final decision had been. Behind the scenes, another name stood shoulder to shoulder with Kashiwara: George Lusztig, a Romanian-born mathematician whose towering influence in the field has shaped the landscape of modern mathematics, Edupedu.ro reports.

‘The work of the Abel Prize winner this year is very, very closely related to the work of George Lusztig’, says Olivier Schiffmann, a French mathematician and external expert for this year’s Abel Committee. In an interview with Edupedu.ro, Schiffmann, who is Professor at Paris-Saclay University and Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), offered rare insights into the internal logic and nuances behind one of the most prestigious decisions in the world of mathematics.

Both Kashiwara and Lusztig are luminaries in the realm of representation theory, a branch of mathematics that investigates symmetries using algebraic tools. According to Schiffmann, ‘In representation theory I think it is fair to say that Lusztig is the number one’. Yet the committee ultimately leaned toward Kashiwara, not necessarily for greater brilliance, but for the breadth of his influence: ‘The difference between them was a small one. I think that the Abel Committee decided to go for Kashiwara because he also worked in algebraic analysis. Basically, Kashiwara worked in two areas and Lusztig was very, very influential in one’.

Kashiwara’s contributions, detailed in the official citation, include his development of D-module theory – an algebraic framework for tackling partial differential equations – as well as his formulation of the Riemann–Hilbert correspondence and the discovery of crystal bases in quantum groups. His work is a bridge between algebra and analysis, theory and application, geometry and logic.

But Lusztig’s achievements are no less monumental. ‘He founded an area which is now called geometric representation theory’, Schiffmann explains, referring to the way Lusztig brought deep geometric intuition into the study of abstract algebraic structures. His theories reach even into number theory, enabling mathematicians to understand how groups behave over finite fields – a crucial aspect of modern cryptography and coding theory.

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